Quotations from Humboldt, "Personal Narrative" last modified:1/16/13

The urge to travel

From my earliest days I felt the urge to travel to distance lands seldom visited by Europeans. This urge characterizes a moment when our life seems to open before us like a limitless horizon in which nothing attracts us more than intense mental thrills and images of positive danger. I was brought up in a country that has no relations with either of the Indies, and I lived in mountains far from the sea and famous for their working mines, yet I felt an increasing passion for the sea and a yearning to travel far overseas. What we glean from travellers' vivid descriptions has a special charm; whatever is far off and suggestive excites our imagination; such pleasures tempt us far more than anything we may daily experienc in the narrow circle of sedentary life. My taste for botanizing and the study of geology, with the chance of a trip to Holland, England and France accompanied by Georg Forster, who was lucky enough to travel with Captain Cook on his second world tour, helped determine the travels plans I had been hatching since I was eighteen years old. What attracted me about the torrid zone was no longer the promise of a wandering life full of adventures, but a desire to see with my own eyes a grand, wild nature rich in every conceivable natural product, and the prospect of collecting facts that might contribute to the progress of science.

from Alexander von Humboldt, Jaguars & Electric Eels, translated by Jason Wilson. London: Penguin Books, 1995. pp. 1-2.

Humboldt's travel through the Americas began in 1799 and ended in 1804. The "Personal Narrative" comprises the final three volumes of his "Voyage aux régions équinoxiales du Nouveau Continent", which comprises thirty-five volumes, and was written betweeen 1805 and 1834. Thus Humboldt is recollecting events and emotions that span not only the years of his travel, but those well before it; and he wrote his narration after the travel (sometimes many years after its end). The title "Jaguars & Electric Eels" was supplied for this translation and edition, and is not by Humboldt.